[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Technical Seminar today at 15:00

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Tue 2013-06-18 at 15:00

Location:  Auditorium          

Speaker:   Guy Lemieux (UBC, dept of ECE)

Title:     FPGA-based Vector Processors for High-Performance Embedded Computing

Abstract: The latest FPGAs contain upwards of 1,000 integer multipliers and an equal number of distributed RAM blocks. This gives enormous potential parallelism and memory bandwidth, but harnessing this power has
traditionally been restricted to hardware engineers who know VHDL. To solve this problem, we have devised an FPGA-optimized vector processor that can be programmed using a regular C compiler. This brings reprogrammable, hardware-like performance to embedded systems.

Our processor, called VectorBlox MXP, supports variable-length vectors operating memory-to-memory on a large, on-chip, banked scratchpad. Although FPGAs top out around 200MHz, they achieve this performance through massive parallelism. Beyond traditional 1D vectors, we have extended support to iterating over 2D and 3D arrays and windowed operations with a single instruction. Due to increased efficiency, the vector architecture and programming model produces speedups over 20x using just a single 32-bit ALU. We have also measured speedups approaching 1,000x on a 64-ALU system. On data parallel benchmarks, the MXP can out perform an Intel Core i7-2600 (single-threaded, no SSE/AVX) running at 3.4GHz.



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